“Syme was not only dead, he was abolished, an unperson.”

Learning it the wrong way

If you attended College de Sorbonne in the Late Middle Ages, you would have been attending one of the finest theological schools on earth. No faculty was more respected by the Holy See, and no one could question the care and diligence with which you received your education. Nevertheless, you would be standing on the wrong side of history — the Reformation and the Enlightenment would see to that.

Then there is “inverted-pyramid style”—an image I have never quite understood—which stands for the principle of putting the most-crucial information at the top of a story and leaving the details for below. Pyramid style is regarded as a bit old-fashioned these days, hence all those florid subordinate clauses at the top of both the Times and the Post versions of the health-care story. The revolt against pyramid style is also why you get those you’ll-never-guess-what-this-is-about, faux-mystery narrative leads about Martha Lewis, a 57-year-old retired nurse, who was sitting in her living room one day last month watching Oprah when the FedEx delivery man rang her doorbell with an innocent-looking envelope … and so on. (The popularity of this device is puzzling, since the headline—“Oprah Arrested in FedEx Anthrax Plot”—generally gives the story away.) But ruthless adherence to classic inverted-pyramid style can also lead to repetition of the story again and again, with one or two more nuggets of information each time.

I learned inverted-pyramid style and its cousin “start with an ambling anecdote” in a journalism lesson in school, then again at a high school paper, and then again at a college newspaper. In each case, I wondered what the point was. After all, why not just get to the point?

The problem, though, is not necessarily the style itself (or the length, which weirdly bothers Kinsley… after all, would he have the same complaints about 10,000-word New Yorker profiles? Well, maybe he would), but the frame of mind that limits one’s thoughts, however gifted and talented one is, to the locked-in set already in place. The theologians studying at the Sorbonne were no dumber than the Protestant reformers or the Enlightenment philosophes. They were simply misled from the start.